Sony is closing its in-house Firewalk and Neon Koi studios

UPDATE (19:45, 10/29/2024)

A Sony spokesperson told Bloomberg that about 210 people will be laid off due to the closure of Firewalk Studios and Neon Koi.

In total, the creators of Concord employed 172 people, and the studio specializing in mobile devices employed 38, according to journalist Jason Schreier.

ORIGINAL NEWS (19:25, 10/29/2024)

Sony announced in a statement that it would be closing two of its internal studios.

Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Studio Business Group since May last year, said the Japanese company is set to close Firewalk Studios and Neon Koi.

Firewalk Studios was founded in 2018 by Tony Xu (Senior Vice President of Destiny at Activision), and in 2019 it became part of MaybeMonsters, a publisher created by Harold Ryan, Bungie’s CEO until 2016. In 2021, it was announced that the first game from the studio would be a new AAA multiplayer IP released by Sony, who decided to buy the studio in 2023.

In May 2023, the studio’s first game, the heroic PvP shooter Concord, was officially announced, although a more detailed presentation of the project had to wait until May 2024. The game released in August of this year with an insufficient user base for a multiplayer project of this scale; Sony shut down the game’s servers and refunded customers just a week after its release.

Hulst confirmed that Concord will not return to stores in any other format. Be aware that space first person shooters are very competitive and that they didn’t achieve their goals with this game. Looking to the future, he hopes to use the lessons learned from Concord to expand the company’s capabilities in games-as-a-service.

Neon Koi, a studio specializing in games for mobile devices, will also close its doors. The studio was acquired by Sony in 2022 under the name Savage Game Studios, which changed in November 2023 after the departure of several important company representatives.

Neon Koi was working on a “AAA game-as-a-service for mobile devices”, which was also cancelled.

At this time, we do not know how many jobs have been affected by both closures. Hulst says they are trying to move workers from both developers into Sony’s remaining internal studios “as much as possible.”